Like a few other writers here, I've been enjoying Sleeping Dogs this week. But not necessarily …
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The thing I love most, though, is that Yakuza games are a soap opera. A core cast of characters spin around each other over hundreds of hours, sometimes friends, sometimes enemies, all of them brought to life with slick cinematic sequences and some terrific, celebrity-studded voice acting. They're telling stories of loyalty, betrayal, violence and sex, and like a televised soap, once it gets its hooks into you, you'll sit and not give a damn that a cutscene has been going for nearly an hour, because you're lapping up every word.

So, yeah, I think these games are pretty great. It's an opinion that's been especially forged over the last few years, as Yakuza 3 and 4, after an absence of a few years on Western consoles, brought the series back to English-speakers with a tasteful (if in Yakuza 3's case also a little heavy-handed) localisation.

It's funny, for all the Japanese games you and I have ever played—and they number in the…
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Which makes me wonder: where the hell is Yakuza 5? Or at least news of Yakuza 5's Western release?

The fifth main game in the series was released in Japan in December 2012, to rave reviews, including—for what it's worth—a perfect score in Famitsu. It's by all accounts the biggest, most badass Yakuza game yet, which is certainly saying something, considering the last three games (3, 4 and a zombie spin-off) have been epics in their own right.

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Yet here we are, in February 2013, and we haven't heard a peep from Sega. I realise that the game's localisation process takes time—the last three games have been released around a year later than they were in Japan—but what concerns me is that, well, this is still the case. If the last three games were all brought to Europe and North America, could Sega not have begun the translation process a little sooner?

If I sound impatient, well, that's because I am, but I'm also concerned about the timeframe of the project with the announcement of the next PlayStation console on the horizon. Waiting twelve months for a Yakuza game on the PS3 wasn't a big deal because, twelve months later, the only Sony console I had plugged into my TV was a PS3.

Sony just posted this video on the PlayStation blog. Looks like a teaser for the next PlayStation…
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This could threaten shelf space for PS3 games, in turn threatening the likelihood of, say, a little niche game like Yakuza 5 being carried by stores.

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Basically, what I'm getting at is that I'm worried the PS4 launch—and the silence on a localisation timeframe for the game—means a Western version of Yakuza 5 isn't a certainty. And that makes me worried. You might even say paranoid, since I'm making multiple leaps of faith in my assumptions here, but whatever, I love these games, I don't care.

I've contacted Sega for word on the game's likelihood of coming to foreign shores, but have yet to hear back. Fingers crossed.

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UPDATE: Here's Sega's reply. "We have no comment on this matter". Great.